How I discovered that countless women have been with men who don’t wipe their bums.

The following article is NSFW and not suitable for anyone with a... sensitive stomach. Please, don't read while eating. Or drinking. Or operating heavy machinery. 

I have a popular Instagram page called Tinder Translators, where we have (very) frank discussions about the highs and lows of dating cis, heterosexual men.

And look, there are a lot of lows. 

But even knowing this, nothing had quite prepared me for the revelations on male hygiene I encountered recently. This window into the ways some men fall short of even basic standards of cleanliness and still expect to ‘get theirs’ was a wild ride that revealed a lot more than just the skid marks. 

It started with a DM. A follower messaged to let me know that there are a whole subset of men who don’t wipe their arse after pooing because they think that it’s gay.

Okay, no. It had to be a lie.

What fresh hell is this? It’s the toxic mix of homophobia and fragile masculinity for me. 

Image: Supplied.

Image: Supplied.

Image: Supplied.

Of course, I had to share this fresh and disturbing information with my followers. Little did I know I was opening a can of worms. And when I say ‘can of worms’, I mean ‘portal to hell’. 

The messages began to flood in. 

Women telling stories of men leaving skid marks on towels after a shower. Sex workers telling me that their clients with vulvas would turn up showered and shaved, whilst those with penises would all too often arrive, and I quote, “with caked on d**k cheese and have never learnt to wipe their asses”. Gross, I know, but it doesn’t get any better from here. 

Image: Supplied.

Image: Supplied.

These stories were seemingly so commonplace that I decided to do a survey. It showed that 62 per cent of respondents said they had encountered really poor hygiene in an intimate partner. I put up a question box on my stories and asked for more information.

There were the teeth stories. One woman taught her boyfriend – a grown man - how to brush his teeth because he didn’t do it, ever. Another lived with a guy for nine months and saw him brush his teeth once. Another had dated a man who didn’t brush his teeth. Instead, he would “scrape his teeth clean with his fingernails”. No joke.

There were the skid mark stories. Left on women’s sheets. Left on trousers because the guy didn’t wear underwear. One left a brown imprint on a white chair. There was even a man who went to the loo, came back to bed, wiped his arse on the sheets and went to sleep. He was in the room with the toilet roll but he came back to soil the bed. 

I cannot.

There were stories so bad they made me feel deeply uncomfortable, and I told my followers I wouldn’t share them. But in response, loads of them asked to hear. I posted them with a content warning in the end. But I am assuming that if you’ve read this far, you want to know too. So here you are, welcome to hell:

Image: Supplied.

 

Image: Supplied.

Image: Supplied.

Of course, I then got loads of people messaging me saying, "well, why did she sleep/stay with that guy". And it’s a valid question, but a depressing one nonetheless. When you read a litany of accounts of men’s poor hygiene and your first response is "why do the girls let them get away with it?" that’s pretty telling. It shows the gaping chasm between the standards we hold men and women to. 

It’s disquieting to know we live in a world where a woman pays to have every hair below her eyebrows ripped out by the follicles in preparation for the same date that a man will turn up to with... God knows what. 

Why is it that women are so conscious and obsessive about keeping their bodies clean, and some men don't even engage in basic hygiene practices?

Yet it’s still the women we focus on: why are they letting the men be like this? As if we’re the ones with the power. 

Of course, I would always encourage any woman to walk away from any situation in which she is disrespected (and failure to wash one's undercarriage before intimate relations is certainly disrespect). I will always seek to uplift women and teach them their worth. ‘The bar’ should be so much higher than simply “a man who can wipe his arse”. But too much focus on this obscures a wider narrative that needs discussing. 

We live in a world where young women are taught that their worth is intrinsically linked to their desirability; specifically, how desirable men find them. Meanwhile, young men are surrounded by messaging that teaches them they are entitled to the desire – and the bodies – of women. So of course women preen themselves to perfection and ‘put up’ with things they shouldn’t have to. And of course some men arrive at the moment of intimacy having not even considered how their hygiene could impact their partner. 

Well, newsflash for the unwashed men out there: we’re no longer putting up with your crap. Pun very much intended. 

You can follow Tinder Translators here, for more candid discussions about the reality of dating in 2020.